Australia: The widely reported Echelon network
[1], child of the NSA
and the rumored UKUSA agreement, took a step out of the closet when
the director of Australia's Defence Signals Directorate openly
admitted
[2] that his country participates in UKUSA.

US: Members of the House of Representatives demanded that the NSA
reveal what guidelines protect citizens' privacy from Echelon; but
NSA refused
[3] on grounds of attorney-client privilege. To the best
of my knowledge this is the first such claim in the 200-year history
of Congressional oversight of administrative agencies
[4].
Representative Bob Barr introduced an amendment to the Intelligence
Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 (H.R. 1555) that requires the
director of central intelligence, the director of the NSA, and the
attorney general jointly to prepare a report detailing the legal
standards used to initiate and gather domestic intelligence. The
House approved the amendment on 13 May before sending the bill to
the Senate.

Germany: The cabinet released a policy statement
[5] encouraging its
citizens to use encryption without restriction. Without mentioning
Echelon by name, the statement nods in its direction. Here are an
English translation
[6] and Wired's coverage of the story
[7].

Sweden: The Foreign Department is investigating the claims of
industrial espionage in the European Parliament's IC2000 report
[8]. (The
text downloads 332K. Turn off graphics to avoid another 761K; the
graphics add little to the report.) This Datateknik story
[9] tells
the tale (in Swedish).

According to the report Interception Capabilities 2000 (IC2000), US
National Security Agency (NSA) has been using signal-snooping technologies
to acquire sensitive internal information from European companies
(Thompson and Airbus). This information has later been turned over to
American companies, causing uneven competition for important contracts.

"We will look closer into this matter. Should it turn that the
allegations are true, it would be most severe. Our problem however is to
first find out whether the allegations are true or not", says Niklas
Johansson of the Swedish Department of Foreign Affairs.

The Swedish Security Police (SÄPO) have been working for some time
already to find out whether Swedish industry is being attacked by foreign
industrial espionage. They have not yet reported any claims similiar to
those stated in IC2000.

IC2000 was brought to the medias attention a couple of weeks ago, not
only in Europe but also in the US. It has caused some major high-level
political discussions in Denmark. The report, which can be found in its
entirety at [1], describes in detail the signal-snooping, how it works and
how it was built up during time. There are now 120 satellites listening in
on traffic from the telecommunications networks and Internet: even optical
cables that span across the ocean floors are attacked. The report states
that individuals can be identified with the help of voice recognition.
Thanks to very-large scale data mining, the important pieces of
information can be extracted.

Some 30 countries, including Russia and China, are using advanced
signal-snooping intelligence, according to the report. It is estimated
that about $18-23 billion are spent yearly worldwide. The US-lead Echelon
project, a global network with UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as
the key participants, accounts for most of that cost.

This kind of espionage has been known for a fact for a long time, but
what's relativiely new and politically sensitive is that the information
is being used for industrial and commercial purposes. IC2000 states
several examples:

Reports from Australia state that information has been used
during coal and steel trade negotiations with Japan

The American-based Raytheon Corporation (which among other
thing is responsible for maintaining the espionage satellites),
got a contract worth 100s of million USD from Brazil, after
espionage revealed a competitive offer from a non-US company.
(Soon after, the competing company got accused for having tried
to bribe ministers of the Brazilian government.)

Fax and telephone traffic between Airbus and the Saudi
Arabian government and Saudi Arabian airline were tapped,
revealing that Airbus had been bribing Saudi Arabian officials.
The information was passed on, and the $6 billion-contract
eventually went to Boeing and McDonnel Douglas.

IC2000 reports several other cases where the American government has
been using information acquired by its security agencies to help US-based
companies, ranging from details about the upcoming new Japanese rules for
vehicle emissions, to the GATT negotiations.

The basic question whether these controversial allegations are true or
not remains. It it also unclear how the European Parliament would handle
it, should it turn out to be true. Officials have said that it is still
unclear whether the Parliament will even consider processing IC2000 or
taking an official position on the level of truth in the report.

Last year, the US signal-snooping caused a major debate during the
discussions concerning US-EU collaborations. IC2000 will surely add some
fuel to upcoming discussions on this matter.

IC2000 was prepared and authored by the European Parliament's
Scientific and Technical Options Assessment program office. It's
not yet known whether or not any of the governments within EU have taken an
official position on the report.

This one is bad. Discovered last Monday in Israel, Worm.Explore.Zip[10] has spread with Melissa-like speed and infected Motorola, GE,
Intel, Microsoft, and other companies, some of whom shut off email
service on Thursday. Like Melissa, and like PrettyPark (see below),
this worm relies on victims using Windows machines to execute an
email attachment. When they do it mails a friendly message to
everyone in the victim's in-box and then destroys all files with
extensions .h, .c, .cpp, .asm, .doc,
.ppt, or .xls on any mounted
drive, by setting their file length to zero. You might be able to
recover parts of a file using a disk editor but it would be
difficult and time-consuming. (The worm can't execute on Macintosh or
Unix, but these systems could lose files if mounted in a Windows
network.) For the immediate future, don't execute any email
attachment you receive named zipped_files.exe; and update your anti-virus
profile. Thanks for the heads-up to TBTF Irregular [*] Karl
Hakkarainen <kh at ultranet dot com>, who notes of his employer: "We'll
be crawling over the rubble of this one for quite a while."

Note added 1999-06-15:
Like the ending of Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel,
Worm.Explore.Zip has got one more kick left in it. After a quiet weekend
virus researchers discovered that the worm has a second method of propogation:
it will reinfect any Windows machine connected on the same network, without
requiring a human "vector" to execute an email attachment. The NY Times coverage
[10a]
of this development is charactistically thorough (free registration and
cookies required).

A new worm program, operating in the mode of Melissa, is spreading
fast among Windows users. Here is the best summary
[11] I have found.
Some reports say home users are particularly hard-hit, because they
don't update their virus detectors as reliably as business users do.
PrettyPark was first reported late last week in France and spread
rapidly over the weekend. When a victim -- recipient of a tainted
email message -- executes an attachment named PrettyPark.exe, the
worm replicates itself by copying the email message to everyone in
the local machine's address book. It then silently checks every 30
minutes to see whether the user is connected to the Net, and if so
sends usernames, password files, address lists, and other files to
a number of Internet Relay Chat channels. Makers of anti-virus
software produced filters for PrettyPark in short order. If you run on
Windows 95, 98, or NT, check with your anti-virus vendor. The worm
does not affect Macintosh or Unix systems.

TBTF for 1998-12-15
[12] outlined the issues in the so-called Zurko
patent appeal, which had the potential of opening up the patent
process to sturdier outside review. Yesterday the Supreme Court
reversed the lower-court ruling
[13]. I asked Mary Ellen Zurko, the
lead inventor on the patent, to comment on the ruling's
implications.

The Federal Circuit Court cannot override a patent office
decision if it finds that decision to be "clearly
erroneous." It can only do so if it finds the PTO has been
arbitrary or capricious, committed an abuse of discretion, or
the finding was unsupported by substantial evidence. We
lost our Supreme Court case. But, as co-author and defendant
Morrie Gasser said, after reading the decision, "It took me
a while to figure out that this meant we lost, but for this
kind of entertainment I'd file another one any day." The
ever vigilant Keith Dawson was the first person to tell us.
It's disappointing for us not only because we didn't get a
patent for technology we believed to be innovative, but
because early rumors back at then-Digital had been that our
patent was turned down as a test case for setting back the
bar for non-obviousness. In terms of checks and balances, if
the PTO is discreet and can make a case for its decision,
and if no new facts are found, its decisions stand. This
should streamline the process and save tax dollars, and, as
they argued, they are the organization in the government
best qualified to make their decisions.

There's some difference of opinion in the patent office
ranks, though. I met a kind and informative patent examiner
while standing in the lawyers-only line with my sister-in-
law before the case. We were about the only people around
who weren't there for the earlier case, which ended up
holding that it is a violation of the 4th amendment for
police to bring reporters unnamed in the warrant on a case
(I called it the "Cops TV show" case). The examiner said he
thought we would and should win, as everyone deserves to get
a second hearing. Our lawyer, Ernest Gelhorn, did a
brilliant job at the oral arguments. The only question he
couldn't answer was when one justice asked why they should
care about this case :-). Reading the opinion and dissent,
you can see why. It turned on the interpretation of the
results of about 89 previous cases, and the intended
interaction of two laws. I could sympathize with the difficulty
of the latter issue, as unintended interactions are
something software engineers have to deal with regularly. If
you're ever in Washington, DC, I highly recommend sitting
in for a Supreme Court case. Anyone can. They last only 1
hour and, as Gelhorn said, "It's the best theater in town."

Country-code representatives are only one of the unhappy constituencies

Newly minted TBTF Irregular [*] Ant Brooks
<ant at hivemind dot net>
travelled to Berlin for the ICANN meeting in late May as the
representative for the .za country code, and sent TBTF this report
[14].
Brooks asks that we read it as an attempt to express his personal
views of the proceedings, and nothing more.

In an unfortunate coincidence of timing, by leaving South Africa
for Berlin, Brooks forfeited his right to vote in his country's
second free election.

The wake of the Berlin meeting swirls with controversy over the way
ICANN is carrying out its mandate
[15] (free registration and cookies
required). In this critical article
[16] David G. Post invokes the
shade of US founding father James Madison, one of the authors of the
Federalist Papers. Post says we need to start a community dialogue --
call it the Netalist Papers if you must -- to define the governance
we want for cyberspace.

Consumer advocates Ralph Nader and James Love sent an open letter
[17] to ICANN chair Esther Dyson asking her to clarify the
organization's stance on the issues raised by critics. No reply so far.

Note added 1999-06-17:
Dyson has replied [17a]
to the Nader/Love letter, and the response is a warhead targeted at Network Solutions.
Its tone is so blunt that the techie press, smelling blood in the water, has given
it fairly wide coverage. See for example
[17b].

Meet Andrette[18], knowledge worker for the new century.
Andrette is a Klone
from Big Science Company. She claims to be able to understand
plain-English queries and to present data from back-office servers. So far
Big Science doesn't have any customers whose Klone Servers are
accessible outside their firewalls, so Andrette is the only one of her
kind you can talk to. (This was the first question I asked Andrette,
and she gave me a marketing-speak non-answer, although the correct
answer is in the company's FAQ
[19].) One useful thing Andrette knows
how to do is to tell you what movies are playing near you, and even
in this simple task the chatterbot became confused because I gave my
zip code too early in the process.

It seems to me that these early stumbles are most likely limitations
in Andrette's implementation, not in the underlying technology. And
after all I have little context for a deep discussion with the Big
Science Company. Keep an eye on them -- before long you may be
chatting with a Klone in your first contact with your supplier's help
desk.

Jargon Scout
[20] is an irregular TBTF feature that aims to give you
advance warning -- preferably before Wired Magazine picks it up --
of jargon that is just about ready to hatch into the Net's language.
Over the last two weeks the world has discovered this modest TBTF
resource. Once Yahoo featured it as a Pick of the Week, a score of
newspapers, Web logs, and "best of" pages have picked it up.

The ever-inventive Marcia Blake <blakecomm at earthlink dot net>,
a TBTF Irregular [*], passes on a term she used
to describe a Net
killer-app wannabe to the venture capitalist considering a seed
investment:

This is not a Killer App, but a very decent little Filler
App of the sort that would probably be acquired a day or so
after launch.

e2e, offlist

Marcia Blake further proposes that the phrase take it offline,
commonly used on listservs and intranets, is patently inaccurate.
The intended meaning is to suggest that a topic be discussed
outside the community in which the discussion arose; but such removed
dialog still takes place online. She puts forward as alternatives
take it offlist, or take it e2e
(email-to-email). This latter
invention, back-formed from the common f2f -- face-to-face --
suggests extensions in different directions for other new media: v2v
(voice-to-voice) for a phone exchange, and perhaps c2c for online
chat. A reader notes that e2e is used in SDLC testing to mean
end-to-end.

Several years ago we were talking about all the stuff
Microsoft was throwing into NT, to over-match OS/2. John
said something like, "Yeah, they are trying to make it
fully buzzword compliant." To which I replied, "With all
those initials after your name you don't have much room
to talk." John then said, "So maybe I could just shorten
it to FBC!" We have been using it ever since, in and out
of our NT-related training courses, seminars, and
consulting gigs.

Fully buzzword compliant is in wide use on Usenet. A recent
Deja.com search turned up over 200 separate citations (discounting
postings by people who have incorporated the phrase into their
signatures). But I couldn't find any similar hits for FBC.

This phony press release
[21] (no charge for the Portugeuse
translation) has been making the rounds. Seems that Microsoft has
decided to use the BSOD as a competitive weapon and open it up for
customization.

Major computer resellers such as Compaq, Gateway, and Dell
are already lining up for premier placement on the new and
improved BSOD. [Microsoft president] Balmer concluded by
getting a dig in against the Open Source community. "This
just goes to show that Microsoft continues to innovate at a
much faster pace than open source. I have yet to see any
evidence that Linux even has a BSOD, let alone a
customizable one."

bsodsim doesn't stop at just showing a simulated error
message. If the boss doesn't walk away, the worker can
continue the illusion by hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL, which causes
a simulated reboot. After showing the usual boot messages,
bsodsim will run a simulated SCANDISK program indefinitely.
The boss won't be able to tell the difference.

Finally, here is a utility
[23] you can download
to make aesthetic
adjustments in your very own Blue Screen of Death.

Note added 1999-06-17:
Mark Whitaker <mark at bitrot dot net> adds:

Alongside a whole load of indispensable little Windows
utilities, System Internals
[23a] produce the
excellent BSOD screensaver for NT, complete with optional (and
very realistic) disk thrashing. It's a favourite in our office
-- the sight of half a dozen machines blue-screening away for
all they're worth can reduce the unwary to a gibbering wreck. :)

A California company, Moller International, has been working since
1962 to develop a personal flying machine. Now they are publicizing
the Skycar[24], which the company calls a volantor. It's a
vertical-takeoff-and-landing craft that like the British Harrier jumpjet
uses "nacelles" to contain and direct the force of its
rotors. Here's a photo
[25]
of the 4-passenger M400. You can't buy
one today because no government has certified the device as
airworthy. In 1991 the US Federal Aviation Administration created a
new aircraft category for the Skycar -- the powered-lift vehicle
joins the existing categories of fixed-wing and rotary-wing craft.
In 1992 Moller received the only generic patent ever issued in the
US on an entirely new category of aircraft. (Patents have since
been issued worldwide.) Moller estimates that the first production
M400s could go on sale at around $1M. The company is counting on
mass-market economies of scale to bring the price eventually into
the $60K - $80K range.

When TBTF Irregular [*] Chuck Bury
<cbury at softhome dot net>
first forwarded this story I remembered seeing a similar vehicle
profiled in the 1970s in the magazine Harpers Weekly -- except
the photo I recalled looked more like a personal flying saucer
than like the Batmobile. Lo, here is that very photo on the Moller
Web site
[26].

Paul S. Moller gave this presentation
[27] at the World Aviation
Congress in 1998 -- it has some technical detail on the design and
a quick overview of Moller's development history. A more detailed
history is here
[28].

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, smashing
relativistic krypton into a target of lead, have produced three
atoms of the heaviest element seen on the earth to date
[29]. "We
jumped over a sea of instability onto an island of stability that
theories have been predicting since the 1970s," said physicist
Victor Ninov, principal author of a paper on the discovery
submitted to Physical Review Letters. Stability is a relative thing. In
less than a millisecond each atom of element 118 decayed, by
emitting an alpha particle, into element 116 -- the only atoms of this
element ever seen on earth. Element 116 is also unstable, as are all
the elements down to 106. The rapid cascade of six alpha particles
was the sign the scientists were looking for to confirm the creation
of element 118.

Thanks to TBTF Irregular [*] Chuck Bury for the speedy notification
on this discovery.

Two hundred million years ago, before North and South America,
Africa and Europe headed for the compass points, the land of Pangaea
experienced the largest volcanic outpouring in earth's history.
Scientists have now put together the puzzle pieces to link the New
Jersey Palisades with sites in Brazil, Europe, and Africa
[30]. The
volcanic event that paved an area the size of present-day Australia
in the supercontinent's interior might have played a part in the
late Triassic mass extinction(s)
[31], which began the ascent of the
dinosaurs. (Here's a fine drawing
[32] for cyclical extinction
theorists.) The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province was later torn
asunder by tectonic forces, which carried fragments to places all
around the Atlantic rim. Try this simple visualization
[33] of the
last 180 million years of the breakup of Pangaea; requires
Shockwave 7.

The NY Times featured this image
[34] above the fold: Mars
colorcoded for altitude. (Here's another view
[35] with a color key.)
Besides highlighting the largest known crater in the solar
system -- 1,300 miles wide and 6 miles deep -- the image shows that
the planet bulges below its equator: the southern hemisphere of
Mars is, on average, three miles higher than the northern. Here's
the Times article
[36]. For those who can't be bothered with
registration and cookies, try the BBC's coverage
[37]. The bulge could
explain the origin of Mars's ancient floods, evidence of which is
etched into the Red Planet's stone.

The International Electrotechnical Commission has decided that we
have had enough of the confusion caused by the fact that 2 to the
10th power is nearly, but not exactly, equal to 10 to the 3rd.
Computer scientists early began using the prefix kilo to mean
1024, and by extension mega, giga, and tera to
mean 1024 to the
second, third, and fourth powers. The proposed new units are:

Factor

Unit

Symbol

Origin

Derivation

210

kibi

Ki

kilobinary:

(210)

kilo:

(103)

220

mebi

Mi

megabinary:

(210)2

mega:

(103)2

230

gibi

Gi

gigabinary:

(210)3

giga:

(103)3

240

tebi

Ti

terabinary:

(210)4

tera:

(103)4

Here's an IEEE article
[38]
on the new units and here is the IEC's proposal
[39] (PDF format -- see page 4). Next year you may buy a
computer with 128 mebs of memory and a 20-gib drive. Thanks to Chris
Duncombe Rae <duncombe at sfri dot wcape dot gov dot za> for
prodding me on this story.

Notes

[*] The TBTF Irregulars
are 74 individuals who send me story ideas, make me think, keep me honest,
and keep TBTF ticking over, such as it does. We keep in
touch on a private email discussion list, archived on the TBTF site.

TBTF's 10,000th email subscriber is Chris Chiappetta <cchiappetta at
jenner dot com>. He will, I hope, tell us what his $25 gift certificate
from Amazon.com purchases, and perhaps even review it for us here.
Chris just got his MBA from George Mason University with a
concentration in MIS. Sounds like a winning combination to me. Can any
TBTF reader give Chris a lead toward his ideal career path? He's
looking for an IT job related to sports (Olympics, track, baseball),
law enforcement, politics, the nonprofit sector (e.g. Boy Scouts),
or a dynamic telecom or Internet startup. He's flexible on location.
Chris currently works as a paralegal in Washington DC, mostly on
telecom litigation. If you send him a tip, please drop me a copy.